WWII veteran wrote of experiences before he died

WWII veteran's story one of hardship, honor and success

MERCERSBURG &GT;&GT; Seventy years ago, Sgt. Paul R. Drury, a Mercersburg barber's son who wanted to fly, was held in a German prisoner of war camp.

He had survived being shot down, and would endure a 600-mile "death march" just six months before starting classes at Penn State.

Public Opinion periodically publishes stories about veterans willing to talk about their service to the country. World War II veterans and their stories are becoming rarer.

Drury's story of hardship, honor and success came to Public Opinion through Ralph Heilig, a Chambersburg man Drury mentored 57 years ago.

Drury died in 2007, less than two years after completing his 10-page autobiography "My Life So Far."

"I wish I had more of his stuff, to be honest with you," said his daughter, Bonnie Derrick of Reeders. "My dad never really talked about the war, and I really never knew all of this stuff until he wrote his autobiography."

Drury made a career with the Pennsylvania Department of Forest and Waters, raised six children and rose to the rank of major in the Air Force Reserves.

Before the war

Born in 1921, Drury grew up during the Depression on his grandfather's farm just outside Mercersburg. Few people could afford haircuts, so his father had little income. His mother cooked meals for men who roamed the country, even if she had no chores for them. Bread cost 10 cents a loaf. A dollar got you eight gallons of gasoline.

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When he was 18, Drury learned about manufacturing cloth-covered wings for small planes while working at the National Youth Administration program at Mauch Chunk, Carbon County. Everyone rode at least once in the aircraft housed at Lehighton Airport.

Within a couple of months Drury and others went to work making bombers for England at the Glen Martin plant in Baltimore, Maryland. Unhappy in the sheet metal department, he waited for a slot to install engines. Middletown Air Base offered him a position as a junior aircraft mechanic, but the offer changed when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He was to help repair the air base in Hawaii.

Training

"I did not know how I was going to avoid being sent there," Drury wrote. "My dad always listened to Walter Winchell on the radio every Sunday night. On one night he announced that two years of college were no longer required to become an aviation cadet."

The next day Drury went to Harrisburg to enlist. He failed an eye test. He was color blind.

"I was really down in the dumps and felt really bad as I had hoped to become a pilot," Drury wrote. Rather than join the Royal Canadian Air Force, he waited to be called to active duty.

He asked the draft board to be added to a group of about 25 local draftees in hopes some would stay together. After basic training they went to artillery school, and Drury was sent to Army Air Corps radio school at Scott Field in Illinois. He was the seventh best gunner in his aerial gunnery class at Kingman Army Air Field, Arizona.

He was assigned to an air crew in Salt Lake City, Utah. After training at Tuscon, Arizona, and Alamogordo, New Mexico, they were ordered on Dec. 3, 1943, to Africa.

Overseas

They flew their Liberator B-24J from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Trinidad and Belem, Brazil, where a malaria outbreak in Africa held them for a week. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Dakar, then to Tunisia on Christmas Eve. They were deployed as part of the 450th Bomb Group to Manduria in southern Italy from where they flew missions to the Balkans, Hungary, Italy and Germany.

"On every mission we were met by flak — anti-aircraft guns, fighters or both," Drury wrote. "After a few missions during which we were attacked by German aircraft, and flak kept coming closer, I became nervous and feared we may be living on borrowed time."

The flight surgeon admonished Drury for failing to take his after-flight shot of Bourbon whiskey. He told Drury that the small amount of alcohol would calm him and relieve his fear. Drury took the doctor's advice and developed a taste for Early Times.

Ninth mission

The assignment on Feb. 22, 1944, for the 722nd Squadron was the bombing of the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg, Germany.

The briefing officer said that the plant was building 15 percent of Germany's planes, and the bomb crews could expect up to 500 enemy fighters, according to Drury.

"We were attacked by 10 or more enemy fighters just after the bombs were released," Drury wrote. "I realized that the other waist gunner and I were the only crew members alive in the rear of the aircraft."

The Gallopin' Ghost, named for football great Harold "Red" Grange, was hit in an engine and was leaking fuel.

The two waist gunners and the co-pilot bailed out of the burning plane into the cold quiet of 22,000 feet.

"I may have passed out for lack of oxygen, for a short period," Drury wrote. He recalled the advice to discard his weapon. If a civilian were shot nearby, an airman with a weapon could be charged in civil court. He field-stripped his .45 revolver and watch the pieces fall to the snow. He hit the ground, still clutching the rip cord from his parachute.

"For you the war is over," said the German farmer who helped him up. He had a rifle and a dog.

Drury later told Heilig that he was fortunate. Some men he met in the POW camps told him fliers were attacked by farmers with pitchforks.

While walking out the farm lane, Drury noticed something in the snow he thought to be part of the aircraft. It turned out to be the body of his pilot, Lt. Walter P. VanDerKamp, confirmed by the name found on his Mae West flotation gear. His chute was not deployed.

A civilian took Drury, who suffered burns on his face and hands, to a hospital in Straubing, but not before showing him off to the local residents and letting the women touch his nylon parachute.

Later, Drury heard boots coming down the hospital hallway and a question in English, "Where is the American flyer?"

Heilig said Drury told him, "I was so afraid, I didn't know whether to hide under the covers or under the bed."

"A-ha, throwing bombs at Regensburg, you and me were up there," the officer said to Drury. "Today I shoot you down. Tomorrow, who knows."

The two shook hands, Heilig said. The Luftwaffe ace promised Drury's safety while he was in the hospital.

Nearly 60 years after the war, Drury visited Bavaria on a river cruise and spoke with Gunther Wagner who had researched the crash. The man said Lt. Alfred Hammer, credited with downing 26 aircraft during the war, likely shot down the Gallopin' Ghost. A second bomber was shot down nearby on the same day.

POW

Released from the hospital and taken by train to Frankfurt, Drury was interrogated and kept in solitary confinement. He refused to divulge more than his name, rank and serial number.

"A civilian, probably a Gestapo or Intelligence officer, advised me that I had no identification except my flight gear and dog tags and was considered to be a spy," Drury wrote. "The next morning I was taken from my cell at dawn and taken outside of the building to a walled-in area. I was sure I was about to be shot."

Instead he was taken to the commander who told Drury that he did not know where to send him since he had not cooperated.

Drury looked him in the eyes and asked if the commander would give him that information if their positions were reversed.

The commander said, "Sergeant, you are a good soldier and in fact would be sent to a permanent camp today."

Drury was sent first to Stalag VI. During the move to Stalag Luft IV, a new and larger camp, the officer in charge made the prisoners run and turned German shepherds on stragglers. Machine guns lined each side of the road.

Drury was carving a wooden revolver in camp when a newly-captured British chaplain asked him to carve him one also, Heilig said. Drury agreed with the promise that the chaplain would teach him all he knew about the Old Testament. Drury remembered the scriptures and after the war, related the stories to his Sunday School classes.

Drury said his captors never messed with the Red Cross parcels intended for prisoners, according to Heilig. The German guards also stood in the same chow line for a bowl of potato soup, in which you could hardly find a potato.

The camp routine was broken on Feb. 6, 1945, when the POWs were moved south and out of reach of the advancing Russian army.

About 6,000 POWs set out in groups of about 250 men, according to historical accounts. They marched more than 500 miles in 84 days during one of Europe's harshest winters. An estimated 1,300 Americans perished.

"We had only the clothes we wore and one blanket, and were often forced to sleep outside in the snow or rain, and had little food and no toilet facilities during the long march," Drury wrote. "Many sick or suffering 'Kregies,' as we were called, were left by the wayside or shot when they could not keep up. At times we were fed thin soup made of potato skins and occasionally a piece of horse meat from an animal that had been killed by a bomb or was injured somehow."

Free

The 104th Infantry Timber Wolves liberated Drury and his companions on April 26, 1945, near Halle, Germany. As the freed POWs marched away from the Germans, Drury said he saw "one of the greatest sights I ever saw," a silver eagle on a colonel directing the men from the hood of a jeep.

Once in town Drury, now 23, and another former POW took a Mercedes and went on a joy ride until it ran out of gas, Heilig said.

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower visited the soldiers and told them they would be taken to Camp Lucky Strike in France, then flown home. Drury missed the first boat because he was sick, but hooked up with Paul Hoch, Bob Rockwell and Nelson Gearhart — three soldiers from Mercersburg who had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge.

The Liberty ship took two weeks to cross the Atlantic and disembark at Camp Shanks on the Hudson River. The commander told the men "it was too late in the day to exchange our OD uniforms for summer wear, but he hoped we would not be too uncomfortable to do justice to all the steaks, French fries, ice cream and milk we could eat."

Drury, dressed in new khakis with a pocketful of pay, set out for a 60-day recovery leave. He took a bus or train to Greencastle, then hitchhiked to Mercersburg. He arrived home on July 4, 1945.

He arrived at the Army distribution center at Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Labor Day 1945. Drury was considering a radio assignment on flights to Rio De Janeiro, but needed less than 70 points to qualify.

"No one had ever advised me about points before, but you got points for medals, time overseas and grade," Drury wrote.

His advisor added up Drury's points — 92, enough to be discharged. He chose to be discharged. On Sept. 12, 1945, he was the first soldier to be discharged from the new center at Atlantic City.

Post war

Briefed on the GI Bill, Drury entered Penn State on Oct. 26, 1945, six weeks after classes started. He wanted a college degree in forestry. School proved difficult.

"He was doing so poorly, he was ready to quit," Heilig said.

Forestry professor H. Norton Cope and fellow student Francis X. Kennedy tutored Drury, according to Helig. Drury graduated on time in June 1949.

A month later, he started working as a rookie forester in the Pocono Mountain Forest District. During his 30-plus-year career, he directed helicopters to attack forest fires. He retired in January 1982 as an assistant district forester of Delaware State Forest.

He married his secretary, Marian Johnson, and they raised six children.

Heilig worked as a college intern at Delaware State Forest in 1957 when he first met "the very direct and matter-of-fact" Drury.

"I learned a lot from that man," Heilig said. "We rode together going place to place. There was a lot of time that summer to talk."

Drury was Heilig's immediate supervisor 1961-65 in the same district. They developed a lifelong friendship.

Drury joined the Air Force Reserves immediately after college and retired in 1981 as a major.

Realizing at age 84 he was "traveling upon that level of time toward that undiscovered country from whose borders no traveler returns, " Drury decided to write his autobiography, which he dated March 1, 2006.

He died Sept. 15, 2007. Some of his ashes were spread over his favorite hunting grounds in Wyoming and the Black Hills of South Dakota. The remainder are buried next to his second wife, Louise, in the Reeders Methodist Cemetery.